What Keeps Me Going When I Can’t Not

It started by having a book land on my belly at oh six hundred and an insanely chipper voice say: “Momma, turn da light on! I want you to read to me!”

As adorable as the request was, I couldn’t do more than mumble and groan to Bonhomme to go ask Daddy, since I’d been up a quarter of the night settling the now-chipper toddler, who was not so chipper in the middle of the night with a head cold, and up another quarter of the night from the pain of a migraine that multiple codeine doses could barely dull.

And I still had the migraine.

But in to work it was, since I had an early meeting, to be followed by a mammoth 3-hour math tutorial at school, and back to work again after.

I tell you, it’s pretty darn hard to concentrate on linear equations when you can’t walk straight and light of any kind strobes with an intensity that could kill.

And distill a 20-page policy into a half-page user-friendly diagram.

But still, I somehow managed to do both.

Here’s what kept me going through it all (other than continued codeine doses):

1) The sight of an entire field of sunflowers nodding their heads in perfect time, as if dreaming the same sun-drenched sleepy dream;

2) A flock of geese taking wing off of the river, the wind from their choreographed take-off rippling the water like a wave of visible sound;

3) Hours later, a flock of geese landing, their wings like umbrellas floating, steering in tandem in a silent glide;

4) The delighted smile of a fellow bus passenger as she shared that same magical landing, and the secret sense of communion between us; and

5) My son at breakfast telling me to shush and listen, and announcing with saucer-like eyes: “the fridge is snoring!”